Can You Buy Me a Finger? You Know Which One…

When I married Cap’n Firepants, I did not realize that there was an extra bonus to this relationship – he enjoys grocery shopping.

I hate grocery shopping.  Despise it.  It bores the heck out of me and the store is always freezing and it depresses me to spend all of that money on food instead of a good pair of shoes.

So, Cap’n Firepants does our household shopping.

We used to have a pretty good system using an app on both of our phones that allowed us to add to the list.  But then we started getting out of sync with each other and one person would have the list finished and the other person would delete it because he/she I thought it was the list from last week.  And then someone would be a bit upset.  So then someone else stopped adding things to the list.

Cap’n Firepants likes to shop early on weekend mornings.  When I am still asleep.  Before he leaves, our conversation goes like this:

“I’m leaving for the store.”

I have a pillow over my head and vaguely hear something.  He taps me on my shoulder.  I whip the pillow off.

“I’m leaving,” he repeats.

I slowly focus on what he is saying.  “Peach Propel,” I say, and put the pillow back over my head.

I am here to tell you that this method does not work very well.

The Cap’n does get the one thing I managed to voice before he left.  And the other things that we always get.  But, then, he goes off the reservation.  And starts buying things that he hasn’t bought in awhile, thinking that we must surely be out of them since he hasn’t bought them in awhile.  It does not occur to him that he has not bought them in awhile because we still have a huge stock of them and don’t need any more.

This is why we have 4 packages of hot dogs in our refrigerator, 3 bottles of Miralax in our medicine cabinet, and 5 thousand packages of shredded cheddar cheese.

It has occurred to me that the solution to this problem is to make a Don’t Buy This Ever Again, or at Least in the Foreseeable Future List.  It would include:

• hot dogs
• cheddar cheese
• Miralax
• potatoes
• mattresses
• anything you expect me to cook that does not have directions on the package

But then I would have to maintain that list.  And, eventually, I will want one of the things on that list, and then we will have a fight over which list is the list of things to buy and which is the list of things to avoid.  And then Cap’n Firepants might decide to put me on a list – of People He No Longer Shops For.

And that would be a disaster for the entire Firepants household.  Because a house without hot dogs or  Miralax and with 5 thousand bags of cheddar cheese is not a house you want to enter.  Trust me.

I now know that there is a whole website dedicated to grocery lists. And they have even published a book. And if anyone can figure out why someone would put “Toe” on a grocery list, then I would love to hear your answer.
courtesy of: http://www.grocerylists.org/top10/#